My best friend Grace has this circus, and the two of them go everywhere together, her and her circus, because they’re in love. Even I have to admit that it’s the real thing, and I …
1. False Husband Not long before we board, another passenger has a request. I don’t think I look sympathetic. Mirrored, there’s only my empty face, waiting for some emotion to twitch …
The professors are having trouble with their marriage. They have been married for twenty-five years and have each had one affair. They know about the other’s affair and usually they …
Winner of the 2012 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, selected by Victor LaValle It is difficult for me to talk about Sarla Shah. These days everyone has a label for her. Some labels I find too …
First came the Bridge of Grocery Tins in Terre Haute. For months, Meredith picked through dumpsters as far north as Clinton and as far south as Farmersburg, even across the Illinois line. She loved …
Weeks, he’d been collecting his thoughts, and now he had them. They were caught in two suitcases, one flannel with a zipper, the other black with brass piping and buckles that clicked when they …
There was nothing particularly ominous about the day the Earth disintegrated. It was a Tuesday, and John and Jane were in the car on their way to visit their son. They had done so every other …
Lexa’s mother had always been funny, but cancer put her over the top. “Intestine pieces are no big deal,” she said in month six of a six-month sentence. “It’s my uterus I miss most. Now …
The gym stands on one side of the hall, Mr. Gates’s class on the other, and every day, after first period, the girls finishing PE and the boys finishing Bible meet in the middle, twisting …
1. I have something to tell you, a secret. I don’t want to tell you, not really, but something, or perhaps someone, is trying to make me. This thing …
There was brick and there was sun. There were floorboards of stained pine. There were water circles from where terracotta pots full of cacti had been, and leaked. The sun went down and people came. …
These are debates into both the philosophy and the physics. They can be heated, the way other couples might argue over politics, money, or infidelity. But those have never been our problems. Our …